x #02
JUL.05
VIDEO
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This interview toke place during the preparation of the exhibition Circa 68, that opened the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum (Porto, Portugal), in 1999.
This is an previously unpublished text.
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video/performance art. Her experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s were essential to the development of contemporary art in many genres — from performance and video to conceptual art and to theater.
Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York, where she currently lives and works. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke, MA (1958), studied sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1958-1961, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. She has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, since 2000. .
(Serralves, Porto, Portugal - 21/05/99)
Oscar Faria: First of all, I would like to ask you about the circumstances your work appeared in the 60’s.
Joan Jonas: When I began to work in performance, in 1968, there was a general interest in working in spaces that were not institutional. So, my first performance was presented in, for instance, a church, a gymnasium, also in galleries, in outdoor spaces… I was interested in using spaces for their particular properties; in other words, not the theatre, anything but the theatre. There was a traditional space I was interested in, not traditional spaces.
OF - And why did you choose to “go out of the theatre”? Why that interest to go elsewhere?
JJ - In order to explore new ways of relating to space and to context, my work was very much based in outdoor pieces. I did a piece in the sand-pit of a big beach, called Jonas Beach (“Jonas Beach Piece”) and the piece was based in the idea of distance and how distance affects image and sound. The audience was a quarter of a mile away from the performance and I worked through the idea of sound delay in space, and different configurations of figures in space. I couldn’t have done that any other place. I was interested in the way space would alter my way of proceeding in something. I also worked — when I worked indoors — with mirrors moving in the space; I was interested in how the audience’s perception of the space was altered by the moving mirrors.
Richard Serra, Shift, 1970-72.
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OF - In that field of work related to distance, there’s a outdoor piece of Richard Serra (“Shift”; from 1970-72) and which I think it was important at that time…
JJ - Well, I think there was a group of artists, as you know, working outdoors, working in the desert. This piece [of Richard Serra] has to do with the perception of the land as it falls in different directions and how it affects your perception of not an object but a play.
There’s a great deal of interest in each other works, because in New York everybody knew each other, the dancers, the visual artists, the musicians, the composers. And so, what really interested me about the performance was that I could work with all this different elements, also due to my visual arts background.
OF - Did you have a visual arts background, as an historian?
J.J: I studied art history and sculpture. I made sculpture and studied art; I was very involved in art history, so my work was also related to that.
OF – But, as some artists of visual arts were against, in a certain way, minimal sculpture, could we also found that kind of situation in the fields of performance and dance?
JJ - I was interested in breaking away from the minimalist tradition although my work has a kind of formality in its conception, in the choreography and also in the construction of the props and the objects, that probably relates a little with minimalism. I was also drawing from filmmaking (French filmmaking, early French filmmaking, early Russian film, Italian film), literature — since I used Borges in my first piece…
OF - Jorge Luis Borges… And when you talk about cinema is more the experimental or even the social work of Russians like Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov or, later, the French like Godard and others, isn’t it?
JJ - Yes, but essentially, in the beginning, Jean Vigo, Georges Franju, and also the Russians, all the Russians were very important to me.
OF - Were they important to your work in the aspect of montage or in the aspect of the relation with the audience like agit-prop?
JJ: Well, partly, montage, because I constructed my performances, because I had to refer to some art of time in my performances, so I refer to film. I used the idea of montage, I cut from one scene to another, for instance, and I used also the idea of sequences of scenes (mise-en-scène). When I began to work in video I continued to work that way, and I pretended I was making little films in my videotapes. When I began to perform with the video (the video that was going on simultaneously with the live performance) I was making images, a sequence of images. So, I liked the lyrical and rather say the visual elements of [Jean] Vigo, for instance. I was influenced by the way the camera was used by Eisenstein and by all the others, and by the experiments that they made.
OF - Who was responsible for the exhibition of those films in New York and where did you saw that kind of film?
JJ: Well, I don’t know who was originally but I know that there was a man named Jonas Mekas and he had a place called the Anthology Film Archive, in New York. I used to go there, it was near where I lived, in the Soho. Before that it was in a place called the Public Theatre that even had special seats made by Kubelka, made of black velvet and with high sides, so that you couldn’t see the people next to you. Anyway, I went to the Anthology several times a week, every week. There was where I had my film education, basically.
OF – Were your early performances ephemeral or not? Did you perform each piece several times and in different places?
JJ - They were ephemeral because they were performances. But I also made them several times in different places. I made them over and over again because for me it was not about one gesture, was about developing something as, for instance, the sequence of images and actions. It took me, maybe, two years to finish something and I would show it as I was working on it and each time I performed I would change it.
Robert Morris, Waterman Switch, Judson Memorial Church, 1965.
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OF - There were some differences between your work and the work of, for instance, Simone Forti or Ivonne Rainer. You were all trying to go in the same direction?
JJ - No, I think there was a difference, because Simone and Ivonne started out as dancers. The center of their work was dance, and both worked with the visual artists in the Judson [Memorial] Church. I mean with Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman. I came a little later in my work. I saw their work and I was inspired by it but I wanted to go on from them. My work is more related to pictorial traditions and also sculptural ideas, and I think that’s why it’s called performance art, because it’s kind of based in the tableau idea. So, my center had a different source.
OF - And your knowledge as art historian was important in the construction of that kind of tableau? Is there a relation between art history and your performances?
JJ - Of course I looked at painting and sculpture and that had a big influence on me; when I constructed I was constructing a kind of picture arrangement in space with objects moving.
OF – Did you made any specific reference to painters or to sculptors?
JJ - Not in particular… I mean, I liked Giacometti very much of course, but I didn’t want ever to make direct references. There were many elements in all my work, many threads but nothing directly taken from any one person. I wanted to make my own image. I was also influenced by poetry, for instance the American imagists poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D.. I liked the way the poem condenses thought — you have several different layers in a poem and all my work was really constructed in that way.
OF - And is the imaginary of those poets the most important thing in that kind of construction you refer, that kind of cuts you made in the poem?
JJ - Yes, it gave me a kind of freedom to construct. It was intuitive, non-literally, but very related to the way the poem is constructed. After the first mirror pieces — which were rather abstract, although inspired by Borges — I used the ideas of identity and persona and the female. I was exploring issues of female identity and they were related to the Women’s Movement, although in a kind of fantasy way.
OF - Non-political?
JJ - I think it was only political because it was exploring this issues, but it was different, in that sense, from those people working politically.
OF - Because in the 60’s that kind of movement…
JJ - …was very important.
OF - Very important in the States. Do you have some kind of participation in the manifestations against Vietnam War, for instance?
JJ - Not in my work; I mean, I went on some marches, when people were protesting, but never directly in my work.
OF - You made a clear distinction between you as a political being and you…
JJ - … as a woman. I think it was very important politically for me to be a strong artist, and I felt that way then and when I began later to work with the narrative like fairytales and stories, it was always related to the role of the woman in the story, because it represented the women in myself, as a performer. That was always an important question for me.
OF - I remember a photo of you… In that work, the video, you were naked and the mirror is directed to you [“Mirror Check”, 1970, Ace Gallery, LA]. That kind of situations in that time, women naked before an audience… Was it problematic? Wasn’t there any censorship?
JJ - There was no censorship in New York in that time, and it was only problematic… It would be difficult to me to do it, but that was the only problem and I think several other people performed naked also. I think Carolee [Schneemann] performed naked… It’s a natural thing for a dancer or a performer to use the body. That piece came out of my mirror pieces, was like the essence of the mirror pieces. I was interested in ideas of voyeurism and self-examination and I had different layers to do it.
OF - And you developed that idea with the props that you put into the scene?
JJ - Yes, I began awkwardly with the material. I began with the mirror, or many mirrors, with dancers or performers walking with them in a space and the work comes from that interaction with that, improvising and then finding the result through the material or through the space, through the situation.
OF – Is there any piece from those days that you consider one of the most important to the kind work that you were developing?
JJ - Yes.
Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy, 1972.
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OF - Which one?
JJ - Well, “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy”, a video performance that was very important. The whole body of mirror works I made, a number of video performances with mirrors. And then I had an idea, going through all the work, which was passing the image through the mirror, maybe you can call it transmission. So, with the mirrors, the image was reflected in the mirror, back to the audience and also the space. With the video the image passed through the closed circuit video system and outdoors the image was passed through the distance, altered by that. So, I was interested in not just the raw image but in how I could alter it to the audience.
OF – And did you use plain mirrors?
JJ - Yes, they were about five feet tall and the people held them and moved them in the space.
OF - I read somewhere that there was some relation in your work with the Indian Hopi dances.
JJ - Yes, in the 60’s or maybe before, I’m not sure, but around then, I was to the southwest because I wanted to see the Hopi snake dance. I was very lucky, I saw the Hopi snake dance and two other dances, and it had a profound effect on me. There were amazing rituals. I think my outdoor work was affected by those dances, what also happened in my early work and through the middle of my work. Probably, even now, in order to be a performer, to find a reason to do something to a live audience, I relate to the idea of ritual (which is from where dance and theatre came from originally).
OF.: What seem to have caused such impression in those Hopi dances? The movement, the situation, the ambience?
JJ - Everything about it. I suppose one thing is the relation of the dance and the movement and the objects to some underlying spiritual construct. There has to be something, a sense of spiritual energy that goes from the performer, back and forth from the performer to the audience. I didn’t had any specific references in my work to that, but I felt very much that sense of community in the art world in that time. I was also impressed on how props and objects are held by the performers and how they move with the objects and the costumes.
OF - The idea of my generation regarding some of the art being produced in the States is that there is a certain kind of censorship coming from institutions like de National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Is the situation different nowadays facing the sixties and the seventies?
JJ - At that time there was a great sense of freedom. In the late 60’s happened everywhere that people broke away with institutions and tried to broke away with the idea of individual forms of painting and sculpture; music and dance came together. I didn’t consider the existence of any division or line between this forms; I liked to combine them. Now, especially in the 80’s, people started to go back to their form and these divisions were made again. We have these discussions again of the differences between painting and sculpture. There wasn’t a lot of money in the 60’s and all the 70’s but it didn’t mattered, we didn’t need a lot of money and, then, there was no censorship either. Well, there was censorship, for instance, with a wonderful theatre artist and filmmaker called Jack Smith. He made a film called “Flaming Creatures”, have you seen it? It’s totally armless compared to what we see now but they weren’t allowed to show it, just because there were naked people lying around. It was lovely and lyrical and... So, that was that kind of censorship going on but it wasn’t… And also during the Vietnam War, you felt like there was something heavy going on, and so, going to see a Jack Smith performance was definitely underground, and against any kind of conventional, institutional situation. The big difference now is that the National Government doesn’t even found anything anymore. Of course there’s a lot of censorship of certain kind like with Serrano or Mapplethorpe. America is a very puritan country because they do not accept culture as being a natural part of society. Culture is not something that you accept naturally in the United States, you have to fight for it still, so…
OF - And there is the case of Richard Serra…
JJ - there are many things that are difficult…
OF - … to understand. But from the 60’s until today what are the main themes or the main concerns that you maintain in your work?
JJ - Well, I think I’ve slowly over the years been developing a kind of structure, of a way of putting things together, you might call it a style. I’m still interested in some of the basic early ideas which as to do with what is an image and how to construct an image in time. I’m interested in technology, how can I work with technology and how it alters the image or the narrative. What I have developed is more the sense of narrative and the storytelling; that’s something that came in my work in the 80’s. I started working with stories and fairy tales. But, I think the formal abstractions are still in my work and… And as I teach, my students, you know… Young artists that are now interested in all that work from the 70’s. And so, in the last few years I’ve been kind of recycling some of my early ideas. I had to do that probably because of teaching.
OF - It is curious that you talk about fairy tales and narratives because Borges’s fictions are almost fairy tales.JJ - In my early work I also refer to mythology, although it’s not obvious. But I used mythology as a kind of underlying reference and inspiration. I never worked with the idea of a God or a Goddess, or anything like that, but I just worked the idea how myth enters art, for instance in James Joyce. The way he uses the story of Icarus to represent this Young men’s, Stephen Dedalus. Yes, it was a metaphor — Stephan Dedalus — and that influenced me a great deal, that use of myth in literature.
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OF - And about what you are going to do in the exhibition, in the museum, what is it?
JJ - Vicente [Todolí] invited me to come because some of my early tapes are showing here, “Vertical Roll” from the “Organic Honey Series”; and there’s always the question of how to show video. In the last few years I’ve been making this pieces that I call “Minor Theatre”, they’re miniature theatres, they’re boxes made out of wood in the shape of a tunnel. You look into the box and you see a video projection of a performance or a video that I made. So, what I’m doing here? I was invited to construct two of this boxes, one for one of my works (“Vertical Roll”) and other for some dance pieces, like Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham. So, I’m making bigger boxes, that are like 7 feet by 9 feet, much bigger boxes, so that you look inside the box and you see the video work. It’s like a little theatre only it’s an object in space, also because everybody is tired of the monitor. The boxes are good for this particular situation because they protect the video from the light and then you can have a projected image and be able to see it in a space where there’s light.
OF - But is it possible to see the videos alone?
JJ - No, the box in the front is open. It’s like a big frame, the box itself protects the image from the light. But it’s an object in itself. I’m going to design a bench for my piece and, in the auditorium, the box will look like an object on the stage that contains the video piece.
Vertical roll, 1972.
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OF - Like sculptures… “Vertical Roll” is one of the pieces to be shown. How is that work?
JJ - “Vertical Roll” is a piece that I made in 1972. The reason why it’s called “Vertical Roll” it’s because in the piece there’s a rolling bar of the video which is a dysfunction of the television set. And I made a piece which is structured by that bar but it’s part of the performance, in other words, I made a work that it’s about 20 minutes long in which I perform around the rolling bar; all my actions are related to that bar, the rolling bar. In that videotape, “Vertical Roll”, for instance, using costumes and objects — those are from the performance — I traded back and forth from the performance and the videos. Some of the videos came out of performances and some performances came out of working with the video. The actions of this tape are part of my live performance.
(Second day: 13.05.99)
OF - Do you want to tell us something about your relation with the work of Richard Serra?
JJ - It was something that for me was also in the air in the work of Richard [Serra] and others working with the doors of perception, forms and the relation to the landscape and contours of the land. What he was doing was slightly different than what I was doing because he was installing sculpture forms in the landscape, he wasn’t really dealing with distance in the same way at all. But, I talked a great deal with him about his work and I saw some of his pieces being installed. Also, we went together to the desert with Philip Leider, who was the editor of Art Forum in 1970 or 71. We went with Phil Leider at Las Vegas to see Michael Heizer’s piece “Double Negative”; that was a very interesting experience. We went to Salt Lake City, where [Robert] Smithson was developing his idea for “Spiral Jetty”… I was certainly involved in a dialog concerning this outdoor works.
Wind, 1968.
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I think the Hopi dances influenced my solos in the mid 60’s and, then, my first real outdoor piece appeared in 1968 (“Wind”). I filmed my performance on the beach, on Long Island. It was in the winter, there was snow on the ground. It was very cold and at that time I was working with this costumes that had mirrors placed on them (that was the piece that related to Borges). I took from the book called “Labyrinth” all the quotes that had to do with mirrors and I put them all together. After that I memorized those quotes and recited them during the performance — this was not in the film but it was in the performance. Anyway, the outdoor piece did not had the Borges text, it was silent. It’s a 7-minute piece called “Wind” that figures a man and woman in the mirror-costumes moving very stiffly in the background, while five or seven other dancers were doing very choreographed movements in the foreground and in different parts of the landscape. And there was a very strong windblown, and so we worked with the element of the wind, outdoors. That was before I knew anything about Richard’s [Serra] outdoor work, but I already knew [Robert] Smithson…
OF - It’s curious that there was a group of artists that lived in New York searching the landscape. What’s the reason for that need to look for places outside New York?
JJ - I think that, in the first place, maybe it’s a part of being American; also because Richard [Serra] is from California. The landscape is very important to the Americans because it’s a very vast, huge space that we are very involved with in our imagination. I think you find in the writing of Charles Olson or [Herman] Melville this vast space, the idea of a vast space, which is very different from the European idea of landscape, that it was touched and settled… America was untouched, it was uncharged territory and I think that it’s part of the American imagination and it’s from childhood. Even if you’re staying in New York or S. Francisco or Los Angeles, you’re aware of the space out there and, so, there’s an innate desire to go out to that space. That’s one thing. The other thing is that, in this time, in the 60’s — I’m not sure why or how it happened — there was a desire to go to uncharged territories. For me it was the same working outside doing outdoor performance and doing performance and working in video. These were also relatively uncharged, they weren’t confined by any kind of conceptions or frames.
OF - But why did you had the necessity to follow that critic path, regarding minimalism, for instance?
JJ - I think it was simultaneous. For me it was slightly different, my concerns are slightly different from, say, Richard [Serra] and [Robert] Smithson, because I’m working in a slightly different area. An important aspect of minimalism is that it involved the space where the sculpture stands; it was about the space also and the object was only one aspect of minimalism. [Richard] Serra uses minimalist shapes but in a different way and he carries, I suppose, that idea much further, by using the architecture of the rooms, by the plates in the corners and the lining; and the pieces themselves depend on the parts to stand up… You shouldn’t really quote me about this work because I never tried to describe it that way. I was going against minimalism a very different way from that they might have been. But I don’t know if I can speak for them…
OF - Perhaps you are one of the first artists to use video in performance, like Bruce Nauman also used video then in some of his performances…
JJ - Yes, Bruce [Nauman] used video in his studio and in a way that was natural to people that first got their video. They got this cameras called Portapac and the natural thing to do was to set it up and to film yourself — no one had seen himself in this way before or been able to do this immediate recording and playback —, and to see yourself immediately in this closed circuit situation. So, the material result of someone interacting with that system would be to do as Bruce [Nauman] did. Andy Warhol anticipated the time element in his films, he actually anticipated a lot in his work, but we didn’t know about that. Maybe we did it unconsciously, but there were some pieces that we didn’t know about, they’re just beginning now to show that work.
Anyway, in the late 60’s and in 70’s, people were working on that. I found Bruce’s work really interesting; he performed by himself in his studio. It’s slightly different from my work, the video monitors in his installations, like the corridors. I used it slightly differently in the live performances. I made single channel works, also; and seating in front of the TV set, looking at myself, doing different kinds of actions. But it was similar in the way that one worked by oneself in one studio.
OF - It was cheap to work with video then?
JJ - Cheap? Yes, much cheaper than film, because you could buy a tape and it could be an hour, half an hour, and it could play continuously. That was formally influencing, the continuous time… it enabled people like me to make moving images.
OF - And the critics?
JJ - Not many people wrote about my work because it was a comparatively new form, so that was kind of a disadvantage for me. The first critic that wrote about me was Jonas Mekas, just a little short thing in the Village Voice. They thought they didn’t know how to write about performance and video. How does a visual arts critic write about that?
OF - Tell us something about the voyage that you made to Japan. Do you consider that voyage extremely important to your work?
JJ - That voyage? It was very, very… Because I’d never been to an eastern country before and we went to the theatre almost every night, to the Noh Theatre. The Noh Theatre is very poetic, abstract and visual, especially if you don’t understand the language, you look at it in a different way; it’s like a dance and for me that was very important because my work was related to that in many different ways — the visual abstract, a kind of theatre based on movement and ritual.
OF - Anther thing that I want to ask you is about the relation that you pointed out yesterday with poets like Ezra Pound and the imagists. Is it possible to translate poetry into movement? In what extension?
JJ - You see, my pieces are really about how do you make work in time; my work is composed of a series of actions in a picture, using props and objects, that tell a story that could be poetic. And a poem is like condensed meaning and… How to put this in words? Well, like the images, it’s also related to icons in the sense that there’s a metaphor and there’s always the comparison between one thing and another. For instance, “hitting the mirror with a spoon”. In one of my video works I was hitting in the mirror with a spoon and that represented anger only it’s transformed into something else, into an abstraction. It’s very beautiful, the silver spoon hitting in the mirror on the video; and also in the live space, to hear this sound of metal on glass. It’s very loud. Begins as a kind of impulse to do with anger and then it’s transformed into something else. In another piece, “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy”, I was interested in magic and another influence on me was the magic shows, like the magician making tricks. I was interested in exposing the illusion, to show how I make things and I was performing to the camera. I was constantly mapping images for the camera, for the audience, and I was playing this roll, I was pretending to be… I was using masks and costumes to disguise myself and to transform myself into another character, not Joan Jonas. Because I didn’t want to be just Joan Jonas, I wanted to enter a fantasy world and create a kind of theatre fantasy world in performance. I can only say it’s like a visual poem and when I say that poems got a structure, that’s what I’m interested in, the way the poem is structured, like the arrangement of the words on the page. It’s like concrete poetry, a little bit. Here’s a page and there are four images on this page: there’s my performance. And those things inter-relate to each other, overlaps. So, when they’re put together there’s another meaning coming out, which is maybe non-verbal.
OF - Another thing is the influence of cinema in respect to montage. All this idea of cutting lines that were before in the poem… That kind of rupture it is also important to the construction of your performance or…?
JJ - When I first started, for instance, with the outdoor piece “Jonas Beach Piece”, I thought of the structure as being beads on a string, one thing after another and there was just a cut between each one with no attempt to connect them. To make the energy flow from one thing to another, not to try to make a smooth, “arty” transition. Just the Pam! [Joan Jonas hits the table] — go to the next action. And then, later on, I started to overlap the actions and to make the transitions more complicated. And so, for the audience is kind of shocking sometimes because there would be a very abrupt cut, but I like that kind of shock quality of cutting.
OF - Do you still make performance nowadays?
JJ - Yes, I do, not as many. I’m working more with installation work because I can’t travel around and have my art be only existing when I’m present physically. I like to be not present and to leave something somewhere. But I’m beginning to work in some rather large performances….
OF.: Is today the computer something new in the performance field like the video was in that time?
JJ - Not yet for me.
OF - Because I saw Merce Cunningham, for instance, and he uses the computer to construct…
JJ - No, in that way I don’t use it but the programs are very useful, especially for dancers choreographing things in space. Of course it’s interesting. I’m still working on. I have a computer and I’m going to work with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and I think it’s interesting there to try to develop something, actually. I’m going to try to work with other people at MIT. The most interesting CD-Rom I’ve seen so far was by William Forsyth (the director of the Frankfurt Ballet). He made a CD-Rom about his choreography technique and it’s really good. It’s very well done and it enables you to play with the movements of the dancer, it’s really wonderful. For me it’s not yet, but maybe in the future.
OF - In the 60’s who was also doing performance? Carole Schneemann?
JJ - Ivonne Rainer, in a different kind of thing, it was more like dance but it had elements that were visual, because she collaborated with Robert Morris. There was a very important piece called “Waterman Switch”, by Robert Morris (Ivonne and Robert performed it together); it was a very beautiful piece; and Robert Whitman, very beautiful. Happening they were called; they were called performance art or something, later.
OF - Later…?
JJ - I was in New York and I was working, I was making sculpture and I saw a work by Lucinda Childs. I immediately said to myself “I have to do this, this is what I want to do; I want to make performances”. I called them pieces, I didn’t called them performances, because I was still relating it to another forms like music and film and poetry.
OF - But it didn’t related to the sculpture you were doing?
JJ - yes, also with sculpture. But I changed completely; I dropped what I was doing in sculpture totally and then started working with myself in the space in relation to objects and costumes.
OF - I think the idea of happening it’s extensive to Allan Kaprow — who was one of the first to do it — and also John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg…
JJ - All this things really started with the Dada, I would say; and the futurists. They all did performance, the futurists, the constructivists. Performance comes in and out of focus for the use of live art; it comes and goes.
OF - Tradition talks about a changing of paradigm in the art history in the 60’s. Is it clear to you that the first changing of paradigm in art history was in the beginning of this century with the avant-garde movements? Do you think history have an up and down flux, in which a paradigm returns after a while?
JJ - Absolutely. I think it is interesting to be at the end of the 20th century now, because we’re looking back. People who are interested in history are looking back. To see the transformations, I think it’s really interesting to see that the 20th century began before that. [Marcel] Duchamp is a major influence, and it’s interesting seeing all those threads going all through, and different people pick it up and developed in different ways. That’s what happened.
OF - What do you think it was the evolution of performance after what you did in the 60’s and the 70’s?
JJ - In the 80’s there were two things that were related: (1) there’s an interest in more popular culture, so performance art started playing specifically with the idea of spectacle; (2) and also being more involved with opera. For instance, Robert Wilson was more a theatre artist, I would say, taking his theatre art into the Opera, into this bigger form. That’s one way it developed. And now, in the 90’s, because the young artists and students are looking back to the 70’s and, in a sense, rebelling against the 80’s — but also using things from the 70’s mixed with 80’s —, it’s a kind of coming together or a synthesis. I felt from the late 70’s that we were in a kind of mannerist period, because when I was studding art history I was interested in this Wolfgang Theory, the Pam! [Joan Jonas hits the table again]. For me this was a kind of mannerist period, of looking back and quoting, refashioning old forms and recycling forms from the past. And for the students that work with performance, the ideas of performance are in their work even if they are not doing performance. So, I don’t think there are a lot of young performance artists because they would rather do other things. Commercially it’s not a viable form; it’s a very difficult form. However there’s a great deal of influence and if I do a workshop they’re very interested in coming; they want to make performances. But many of them are using the ideas in video, in installation; its just part of the vocabulary. I think that (maybe an explanation also) the people want to go back to something simple, that they can control with their own bodies, that they can touch. And maybe that’s why performance art is coming back.
I think it’s also interesting this relation with the major TV because in the 70’s we — the people working in video — had this hope that we would be able to intercept and be part of television. Gradually, that’s become impossible, in certain sense. And so, there’s now a separation between video art and television; in the 70’s we thought it was going to somehow come together. Now we’re working against it and inside it at the same time.
The other thing I want to say about — this is in relation to another question you asked me about how do I begin my pieces — it’s hard for me to talk about it, for there’s a part of me that express in performance that I never can express verbally. It’s about acting in a different way, and it’s about entering a zone than the normal everyday world of functioning; and one can use fantasy and one can pretend one is somebody else and create a whole world out of… The first thing I do is make or find a space for myself; I claim it as my space and I move in that space; and maybe I bring music and sound and the music and the sound inspire me to dance or to move with the prop — when I find a prop that as to do with the story that I’m using. All those elements together enable me to create a kind of character, or the illusion of character or persona within the context of the performance. Is very important for me to leave my everyday life and enter a kind of fantasy world which I enjoy very much, and which is totally different from my everyday world.
OF - It’s like Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
JJ –Yes, is very much like “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, exactly. That’s what inspires me about [Jean] Vigo’s “L’Atalante” and the Cocteau film “Beauty and the Beast”. It’s another fantasy world, it’s another magical world. I was interested in creating that world and showing it to the audience, bringing the audience into my private world, because that’s what a lot of people say about my work. Some people are even uncomfortable because they feel like they’re in my private world.
OF - I think the critics, most part of American critics nowadays, have a clear preference by some other kind of performance not so poetic like yours, but more objective like the performances of Paul MacCarthy and Mike Kelley, for instance. Do you think that poetry belongs to the 60’s and the 70’s and after those other artists like Paul MacCarthy and Mike Kelley tried to fight against the commercialization of art doing something that is abject?
JJ - I think so, yes, absolutely. I think there’s not such a huge distance between my work and their work. They are much more involved in dealing with this other matters that you call abject, it’s true. But if I say my work is poetic I don’t mean it’s poetic in a kind of romantic sense, I just mean in the structure of it. I try to show very personal things but not in an autobiographical way. The way Mike Kelley… He doesn’t do it so much anymore, it’s difficult for him, but they are very related to Rock & Roll. Mike Kelley is related to that world of music. Definitely, they’re the next generation reacting against the esthetics, my generation, which is not that older, it’s like a decade of reaction. I think they like my work, it’s just I haven’t been doing as much work; you go in cycles like an individual, you work very hard and then you don’t work, and then you start again.
OF - But they are more violent in their performance. They do that, I think, against a kind of puritan American society, something you do also, perhaps in another way.
JJ - Well, when I started, my work was at that time disturbing for some people, but I wasn’t trying to… Yes, I did it a different way, in a totally different style. And they do it in a more extreme style, much more extreme on the surface…
Tapes transcription: Joana Mateus
Editing and revision; Joana Mateus e Miguel Leal
Virose.org 2004/05
*Oscar Faria is an art critic and journalist based in Porto, Portugal.
last update: 02.07.08
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